HTML5 Tips and Tricks - Local Storage

As I'm sure you've heard by now: HTML5 is all the rage. People are creating amazing games with canvases, media interactivity with embeds and mobile/response sites with viewports. We've come a long way since 1990s iFrames! In this blog, I wanted to introduce you to an HTML5 tool that you might find useful: Local Web Storage — quite possibly the holy grail of web development!

In the past (and still most of the present), web sites store information about a surfer's preferences/choices via cookies. With that information, a site can be customized for a specific user, and that customization makes for a much better user experience. For example, you might select your preferred language when you first visit a website, and when you return, you won't have to make that selection again. You see similar functionality at work when you select themes/colors on a site or when you enlist help from one of those "remember me" checkboxes next to where you log into an account. The functionality that cookies enable is extremely valuable, but it's often inefficient.

You might be aware of some of the drawbacks to using cookies (such as size limitation (4KB) and privacy issues with unencrypted cookies), but I believe the most significant problem with cookies is overhead. Even if you limit your site to just a few small cookies per user, as your userbase grows into the thousands and tens of thousands, you'll notice that you're transferring a LOT data of over HTTP (and those bandwidth bills might start adding up). Cookies are stored on the user's computer, so every time that user visits your domain, the browser is transferring cookies to your server with every HTTP request. The file size for each of these transactions is tiny, but at scale, it can feel like death by a thousand cuts.

Enter HTML5 and local storage.

Rather than having to transmit data (cookies) to a remote web server, HTML5 allows a site to store information within the client web browser. The information you need to customize your user's experience doesn't have to travel from the user's hard drive to your server because the customization is stored in (and applied by) the user's browser. And because data in local storage isn't sent with every HTTP request like it is with cookies, the capacity of local storage is a whopping 5MB per domain (though I wouldn't recommend pushing that limit).

Let's check out how easy it is to use HTML5's local storage with JavaScript:

Boom! We just set our first variable. Once that variable has been set in local storage for a given user, that user can close his or her browser and return to see the correct variable still selected when we retrieve it on our site:

All of the lead-up in this post, you're probably surprised by the simplicity of the actual coding, but that's one of the biggest reasons HTML local storage is such an amazing tool to use. We set our user's preferred language in local storage and retrieved it from local storage with a few simple lines. If want to set an "expiration" for a given variable in local storage the way you would for a cookie, you can script in an expiration variable that removes an entry when you say the time's up:

If we stopped here, you'd have a solid fundamental understanding of how HTML5 local storage works, but I want to take you beyond the standard functionality of local storage. You see, local storage is intended primarily to store only strings, so if we wanted to store an object, we'd be out of luck ... until we realized that developers can find workarounds for everything!

Using some handy JSON, we can stringify and parse any object we want to store as local storage:

<script type="text/javascript">var user ={};
user.name='CWolff';
user.job='Software Engineer II';
user.rating='Awesome';//If we were to stop here, the entry would only read as [object Object] when we try to retrieve it, so we stringify with JSON!
localStorage.setItem('user', JSON.stringify(user));//Retrieve the object and assign it to a variablevar getVar = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem('user'));//We now have our object in a variable that we can play with, let's try it out
alert(getVar.name);
alert(getVar.job);
alert(getVar.rating);</script>

If you guys have read any of my other blogs, you know that I tend to write several blogs in a series before I move on to the next big topic, and this won't be an exception. Local storage is just the tip of the iceberg of what HTML5 can do, so buckle up and get ready to learn more about the crazy features and functionality of this next-generation language.

Try local storage for yourself ... And save yourself from the major headache of trying to figure out where all of your bandwidth is going!